


Sunset over Black City

by devilinthedetails



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Bazhir in Tortallan Society, Black City - Freeform, Canon Typical Racism, Dark Magic, Demonic Possession, Demons, Destiny, Evil, Gen, Hauntings, History, Knight & Squire, Nightmares, Persopolis, Prophecy, Sunset Room, Ysandir, legend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-08 08:29:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13454388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Like generations of Bazhir, Zahir and Jonathan keep watch over Black City from the Sunset Room.





	Sunset over Black City

Sunset over Black City

Though he was Bazhir born and bred, before he had set foot in the Sunset Room, Zahir had never known what it meant to be blinded by the light. The orange and red of the dying throes of the sun as it sank into the sand burned his eyes, but the brightest light cast the darkest shadow, and it was the void of the Black City, which should have been no more than a blip in the the horizon, that dominated his vision so that all he could see was blackness. 

The Black City was a ghost that whispered to him as it had to generations of Bazhir. Magnetic with a skin-prickling power that attracted and repulsed him, it drew his steps across the tiles, shoes whispering in the sand that had swept in through the open western wall—built not to overlook Persopolis but to watch over the eternal blight on the landscape that was the Black City—even when he wanted to bolt from the room. His eyes longed to drink in everything, even if it hurt, that he could see of Black City, but his heart pounded an urgent command to retreat in his chest. His mind was curious about each evil that had unfolded in Black City, but his tongue regretted ever asking his knightmaster to show him the Sunset Room. His fingers stretched toward Black City but his knees trembled as he reached the end of the room.

At the edge of the room, where a single clumsy footstep could send him plummeting to his doom, he shot an almost challenging glance over his shoulder at King Jonathan, who was still lurking in the threshold after unlocking the door with the key Sunset Room that was entrusted only to the Voice. He expected his knightmaster to scold him for his recklessness, to beckon him back from the brink, but instead, the king remained silent as stone. 

When King Jonathan didn’t reprove him, he sank onto the tiles scratchy with sand and swung his feet like pendulums in the air over Persopolis. The desert air, which cooled so quickly once the sun began to set because there was nothing in the empty environment to trap its heat, bit at his ankles as he kicked it. 

“It’s an evil place, sire.” Zahir’s tongue felt dry as the sand but he managed to speak. “If it wasn’t filled with black magic, the desert would’ve reclaimed it by now, but even the sands don’t dare to touch where demons tread.” 

“It’s a place where blood and darkness have seeped into the stones.” King Jonathan’s robes brushed through the sand-swept tiles as he crossed over to join Zahir. “Evil magic and terrible sacrifices were made there. Before you even set foot in there, you can feel each wasted life, each dreadful death.” 

“Yet you went there.” Zahir tore his stare away from Black City long enough to gaze at his knightmaster. Before the Nameless Ones had been defeated, Zahir’s father said that some Bazhir children were tormented by nightmares that lured them to Black City to be devoured by the demons. These children, Zahir’s father related with a shake of his head, had to be tied to the poles of their tents to prevent them from running away to a certain death in Black City, but the children, haunted by the demons in their dreams, refused to eat and drink, wasting away like corpses in the desert. Zahir wondered if the king had been haunted by dreams like those children, but unlike those children, hadn’t been tied to tent poles and had charged headlong into the Black City to vanquish the Nameless Ones. “Did nightmares drive you there, Your Majesty?” 

“Not nightmares, but maybe a different, equally compelling dark magic from my cousin.” The shadows under King Jonathan’s eyes suggested the nightmares had been when he was awake, not when he was asleep. “Or perhaps that’s blaming my cousin for a decision I made with my own free will. Or maybe I never had free will. Maybe it was all a matter of destiny determined before I was born, and I was merely fulfilling a prophecy told centuries ago.” 

Zahir, who didn’t believe in prophecies or destiny because he felt the future was always blowing like sand in the wind, frowned. “Are you certain you didn’t just want to be a savior, sire?” 

“If I did, would that have been so wicked, squire?” King Jonathan’s eyebrows arched like taut bowstrings. “Would it have been so bad for a prince to want to rescue his people?” 

“Yes, if he’s being a hero because he thinks his people are too hopeless—too primitive—to save themselves.” Zahir’s frown grew into a full-fledged scowl. Remembering how his father, who had been in Persopolis on tribal business the day the prince and his purple-eyed companion (whom everyone had believed was a boy but who had turned out to be a girl), had claimed that every Bazhir in the city had knelt in homage as the ones who had destroyed the Nameless Ones had ridden through the streets. A city built to watch had become a city on its knees, reverent because its mission had been accomplished. It had been the first time, too, that the Bazhir had voluntarily knelt for a Conte en masse, offering the ultimate allegiance, the humblest sign of submission, without being commanded. Zahir wondered if that had been what his knightmaster had been truly trying to achieve, shattering history and banishing the Nameless Ones so that the Bazhir would have to bow before the son of a northern king. “Yes, if he’s only doing it so people will have to kneel before him.” 

“How often have I made you kneel for me, Zahir?” King Jonathan slowly stroked his beard as he studied Zahir. 

“Never, sire.” Zahir’s fingers drew patterns that were a mystery even to him through the sand. 

“You would kneel for me if I ordered you to, though.” King Jonathan laid a stilling palm over Zahir’s shifting fingers. “If I commanded you, you’d kneel on these tiles until you bled.” 

“Is that your command, Your Majesty?” Zahir’s eyes stung as if sand had flown into them. The scorching tears he had to blink from his eyes weren’t even the most humiliating thing. The most humiliating thing was the fact that he knew he would obey—perhaps without even asking why since Lord Wyldon had hammered into his head that a warrior would march a thousand leagues in the sleet if his king commanded it without once questioning why—if King Jonathan ordered him to kneel until his kneecaps bled. 

“No.” King Jonathan’s squeezed Zahir’s fingers in a reassurance that didn’t entirely wipe out the shameful picture of submission he had painted in Zahir’s mind. “You’re a prideful person, Zahir ibn Alhaz, and I respect that—I respect you—which is why I try to never humiliate you. In the same way, I understand that the Bazhir are a prideful people who don’t respond well to being shamed. Part of the reason they have been fiercely loyal to me is I don’t make a habit of demanding that they kneel before me.” 

“You didn’t come down here to break the Bazhir then, sire?” Zahir bit his lip as he posed the question that he realized abruptly had been haunting him since he had first heard the story of the Voice banishing the Nameless Ones from Black City. 

“The world was a different place when I first arrived in the desert, squire.” King Jonathan sighed. “When my elders sent me down here, it was so that I could be prepared to survive in the desert when the next war with the Bazhir broke out, since, when I was young, it was seen as inevitable that there would be more violence between the Bazhir and the northerners. I came down here hoping that my elders were wrong, that I could learn more about the Bazhir, that I could understand them, and that they could respect me. I didn’t come down here looking for submission but for peace and understanding. I found those in Ali Mukhtab.” 

“Ali Mukhtab.” Zahir echoed the name of the man who had been Voice before Zahir was born (Zahir had never known any Voice but the northern king). Ali Mukhtab was an enigma to him. Some insisted that Ali Mukhtab had been a visionary, finding a way to peaceful knit the Bazhir into the rest of Tortall without surrendering their whole culture. Others whispered that he was a traitor to the Bazhir, compromising everything that made the Bazhir when he allowed the grandson of the ultimate northern oppressor to become Voice, the spiritual leader mightier than all the shamans combined. Zahir’s father fluctuated between the two views depending on which way the wind was blowing, but, being a practical man, he had shipped Zahir to the north to learn how to fend for himself in their cold, cruel society. “What was he like, Your Majesty?”

“To me, he was a great mentor and friend. He was clever as the cats he loved so much. His agile mind thought about things in a way nobody else did, coming up with solutions no one else could see. He honored tradition but was daring enough to strike a new path when he felt it was needed. He was gentle but firm. During a time in my life when I was quite impatient, he was always abundantly patient with me even though I didn’t deserve it.” King Jonathan gave a wry ghost of a grin. “It was he who first brought me to this room when he was steward of this castle. When he described for me the purpose of this room and the history of Black City, I didn’t imagine that he would play such a large role in my future, but he might have always known that we were written quite deeply into each other’s stories, or maybe he didn’t know that until I expressed a particular interest.” 

“What particular interest, sire?” Zahir cocked his head, intrigued. 

“In a written history of the Bazhir.” King Jonathan’s gaze flicked to the mosaics on the pillars, depicting the Bazhir’s struggle against the Nameless Ones—first toiling as slaves in a once fertile land, then awakening to their bewitchment and literally scorching the earth to rain fire, the only thing the Nameless Ones ever feared, down from the heavens on the demons who had ensnared them, and then finally using the force of every shaman to trap the spirits of the Nameless Ones into the Black City. If the walls of the Sunset Room could speak, they would scream of carnage and dark magic. “I could read some of it on the pillars, but not all of it, and I wanted to read all of it.” 

“The Bazhir have no written history, Your Majesty.” Zahir bristled. He could almost hear the king, when he had been a proud prince, proclaiming his interest in a written Bazhir history, believing that fascination would mark him as enlightened though it would only prove his ignorance since Bazhir history had never been meant to be recorded. Bazhir history was the inherited dreams of generations flowing through veins. It was legends told around campfires, the words blown through the wind that rippled the desert dunes. It was never meant to be written down for northerners as an something would inevitably be lost in translation. It was supposed to be a memory more permanent than parchment that could be burned and ink that could be smeared. 

That was his knightmaster, Zahir thought, setting tradition on its ear while convinced he was paying homage to the past and affronting people even when he meant to be sensitive. The king meant well, but he would never fully understand the Bazhir, and part of Zahir knew that was because though he was Voice, he had never really tried to wrap his mind in Bazhir customs and beliefs. 

He was a northerner in his soul, rarely visiting the desert, but perhaps that was why the Bazhir were devoted to the Voice who was also the northern king. He traveled so seldom among the Bazhir tribes that they could pretend he was one of them. They didn’t see him enough to perceive that he wasn’t whatever they wanted him to be. The Voice was absent enough that any Bazhir could project onto him whatever qualities they wished and love him for those invented attributes. 

“They do now, squire.” King Jonathan smiled slightly. “Ali Mukhtab wrote one for me at my request. It’s one of my most treasured possessions.” 

“Are you continuing it, sire?” Zahir’s forehead furrowed at the notion of a northerner, even one who was the Voice, writing history for the Bazhir. If Bazhir history was written, he believed in his bones that it should be told by the Bazhir, not by the people who had silenced them for generations. 

“No, I think I’ll leave that task to future full-blooded Bazhir.” King Jonathan draped an arm around Zahir’s shoulder. “Perhaps you’ll add to Ali Mukhtab’s history or write your own story of the Bazhir, Zahir.” 

“That’ll happen the day after the Emerald Ocean swallows the desert in one gulp, sire.” Zahir snorted like a horse. “I’m rubbish at writing.” 

“It’s not the writer that’s important, squire.” King Jonathan ruffled Zahir’s hair. “The story is all that matters.”


End file.
